The nuclear industry in the U.S. has been stagnant as far as new power plants are concerned for decades. Only one license for a new nuclear power plant has been issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the last 35 years. On the other hand, there are almost fifty companies in the U.S. and Canada working on research and development of advanced nuclear power technologies. One and a third billion dollars have been sunk into these ventures by individual investors and major venture capital funds.
Recently there was a workshop called "Building a Scalable, Safe New Nuclear Reactor Design" at the Solve Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Some of the nuclear development companies were there including Transatomic Power, TerraPower, Moltex Energy, Tri-Alpha Energy, and Terrestrial Energy. One of the common complaints often heard from these companies is that the long, complex and expensive licensing process of the NRC is a significant barrier to innovation. Getting a license for a prototype reactor from the NRC can take longer than a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Allison Macfarlane, the NRC chairman from 2012 to 2015, is now the director of the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University. She defended the current NRC licensing process as being necessary and proper. She said that when considering a license for a nuclear power plant, the long time lines, safety concerns and the enormous capital costs that are associated with such a project demand a regulator process that is thorough, precise and expensive.
The nuclear entrepreneurs were strongly opposed to the current regulatory process. They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing new nuclear technologies that they believe are crucial for energy production and lower carbon emissions. They are frustrated by the time and expense of the licensing process and believe that it could and should be much better than it currently is.
Advocates of improving the movement of new nuclear technologies to market agree broadly on what needs to change. They say that the NRC licensing process must be streamlined. There should be a "test-then-license" approach instead of the "license-then-test" system that is now required. Proponents say that the U.S. Department of Energy should be more actively involved in accelerating research and development. And, finally, they say that a national testbed facility should be created where new reactor prototypes could be constructed and tested.
The understaffed NRC is currently launching an effort to reform the agency but it is not the type of reform that the nuclear entrepreneurs are advocating. James Inhoff (R-OKL), head of the committee that oversees the NRC thinks that the NRC should be "downsized." Despite the interest and money that has been invested in increasing the use of nuclear power in the U.S., a February 2015 NRC report foresees that the number of new reactor license requests will drop significantly by 2020. This is one of the justifications used for insisting that the NRC budget be cut.
Nuclear entrepreneurs frustrated by the current NRC licensing process have been seeking more benign development climates abroad. China is being viewed as a good place to launch new reactor development and one of the nuclear startups at the MIT workshop is going to build a prototype of their "traveling-wave" reactor there. Even the U.S. DoE is working on a project with a Chinese partner to build a prototype molten salt reactor.
Supporters of the current regulatory process say that it is not the NRC licensing process that is impeding the expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. They point out that it is the economics of power that favor cheap oil and natural gas over more expensive nuclear power. Critics of nuclear power say that sustainable energy like wind and solar are better solutions to lowering carbon emission than new nuclear power.
